The circumstances of Pamela Lynne Neal’s disappearance couldn’t have been more routine.

The bank teller at Key Savings and Loan at the intersection of Broadway and West Hampden Avenue in Englewood set off for lunch on a sunny, windy afternoon, during which the temperature rose to 62 degrees.

At 1:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 31, 1983, Pamela, who didn’t have her own car, left her bank window and walked two blocks east to another bank.

She was wearing high-heeled shoes and a light green dress.She cashed a check and then stuffed several hundred dollars into her coat pocket.

Then she stopped at a Safeway grocery store, bought a Colorado lottery ticket, a pack of Winston cigarettes and a delicatessen lunch.

Then she crossed Broadway headed for her apartment. The 22-year-old woman lived in a third-floor apartment at 9 W. Hampden Ave. that she shared with another bank employee, Darlene Heintz.

Her roommate was at her own bank teller’s window at work. She watched as Pamela walked to her apartment. She walked by a cabinet-making shop in her building. A man there saw the pretty young woman pass by.

That was the last time that anyone willing to talk about what became of Neal saw her.

When she didn’t return to the bank to work after lunch, co-workers, including her roommate, were worried. She was anything but irresponsible.

Heintz called the apartment at 2:30 p.m. Heintz was beginning to worry.

Heintz left work and went to look for her roommate. She found the door ajar. She called her boss at the bank, who called police.

Reliable

Pamela was not the kind of person who would just leave on a whim. She had a stable background. She loved her job and was a happy person. She was soft-spoken and somewhat shy. She was considerate of others.

Kirk Mitchell is a general assignment reporter at The Denver Post who focuses on criminal justice stories. He began working at the newspaper in 1998, after writing for newspapers in Mesa, Ariz., and Twin Falls, Idaho, and The Associated Press in Salt Lake City. Mitchell first started writing the Cold Case blog in Fall 2007, in part because Colorado has more than 1,400 unsolved homicides.